Buried beneath spoil heaps dredged from the River Barrow, a modest hearth turned up where a motorway bridge was never supposed to reveal anything at all. The find came to light along the Mooreabbey Demesne stretch of Co. Kildare, roughly three kilometres south-south-west of Monasterevin, in ground disturbed by construction of the M7 Heath to Mayfield Motorway Scheme.

Archaeological monitoring of the dredged material uncovered a hearth measuring less than a metre across, made up of a spread of ash and patches of oxidised clay, the reddened earth that results from sustained, direct heat. A small sub-oval post-hole had been cut directly into the hearth and was filled with a mid-brown clayey silt threaded with lenses of the same oxidised clay, suggesting something had once been set upright there, perhaps a spit or a support of some kind. The northern edge of the hearth had been sliced through by a modern drain, a reminder of how many layers of activity accumulate and cut across one another in agricultural lowland like this. Some 69 metres to the east, excavators found a separate spread of heavily oxidised clay and charcoal that contained fragments of a slag-like material, hinting at some form of burning activity that went beyond simple domestic use, possibly small-scale metalworking or smithing, though the evidence stops short of certainty. Metal detecting across the wider road-line and continued monitoring of the remaining spoil produced nothing further of archaeological note.